The past: a bottomless mystery. Memories: distortions, deceptions, lines of reasoning that reason knows nothing of. Early years filled with vignettes, timelines variable: your mother leaves your father, moves you and your sister from the Midwest to Alameda, California, gets a job at a navy post exchange. You are three years old, sis is five. Your mother takes a picture, sends it to Grandma Inez in Minneapolis: you and sis standing against a wall, beneath a window. You are wearing a dark wool skullcap with earflaps. Sis towers over you. She is a tousled blond, pouty, wary. You smile cautiously. Wearing Minnesota winter coats, you’re both squinting in the California sun as if you’re not used to it. As if you are out of your element.

          Within sight of the naval base and parked planes on the tarmac (wings folded upwards, like hands praying to a huge-domed hanger in front of them) is off-base housing sold for civilian use. Yours is an upstairs apartment 104-C Gibbs Avenue. Carol Marie and you share a room, your beds angling 90 degrees against two of the walls. Over your bed: a window where you can look upon a vast courtyard surrounded by fading olive-green apartments on every side. Children play there, play baseball, football, tag and wrestling, fist-fighting, shoot’em-up Cowboys & Indians, war games, hide and seek, kick the can, mumbly peg, make the sissy eat dirt.

          Yard-grass-sparse. Dusty. Rain makes it muddy. With your beach shovel you dig a hole. Fill it with water from the hose. A hole deep enough to immerse your scrawny body. Sooth your scaly skin. Quietly bathing. Believing no one sees you—bag of bones floating in chocolate, a safe womb, your hands and feet sculpting the slick sides, making them slicker, making them silky. The rain faintly falling (misty) the day she comes home from work and calls Duff-eee! Duff-eee! Dull, the sound of her voice. As if from inside a barrel. No time to climb out, rinse at the hose, put on your clothes piled next to the faucet. Only your nose poking out of the muddy water. Which is what your sister spies, dirty ratter, her muffled voice crying, There he is! There he is! Duffy, get outta there!  When your mother flicks your nose you rise to a sitting position, fists rubbing water from your eyes. Mom bending over. One hand on her hip. The other hand holding a dripping magazine umbrella over her frizzy hair. She has a puzzled look on her face. What do you think you’re doing? she says. And she says, What in the world is wrong with you? You shrug. You don’t know? she says. Nuh-uh, you tell her. She looks at Carol Marie. Says sternly, I thought I told you to keep an eye on him. Carol Marie says she did. The trouble is he sneaked off. He’s always sneaking off, Mama. Mama shakes her head, rubs her temples between thumb and forefinger. (Always doing that, a habit caused by a tendency to get headaches. Migraines.) She says you are driving her crazy. She says, I swear I don’t know what to do with you. Why are you so stupid? Get out of that filthy water! Look at you running round naked in the rain. Naked as a jaybird. Should be ashamed of yourself! Get your skinny butt in that house and take a shower. Hurry up before I get the hairbrush!

          The hairbrush. Yes, the hairbrush. You don’t want her paddling your bare butt with the hairbrush. Hairbrush stings! Make you dance. Make you cry. Make you promise to be good. I’ll be good! I’ll be good! Don’t know any kids that don’t get ass-paddled once in awhile. Slapped faces are common. Father’s fist giving you a black eye—not unusual. Don’t know if such disciplinary measures make kids behave better. Probably not. Makes kids fear their parents. Fear their wrath. Makes kids jump to whatever tune parents are tapping. No talking back! No tantrums! Tantrum equals a whipping. In company, children are to be seen and not heard. Grownups are gods.

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